The traffic flowing into a network device—e.g., a router, switch, bridge, server, and the like—is generally made up of multiple abstraction layers (e.g., the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model). Each of these logical layers generally relates to communications functions of a similar nature. For instance, layer 2 of the OSI model is known as the data link layer and uses physical addressing (e.g., Media Access Control (MAC) addresses) for switching traffic. Layer 2 encapsulation generally provides the mechanism for transferring data between network entities, and can also be used for error correction for layer 1.
Additionally, network traffic can generally be characterized based on its routing between a source and one or more destinations. For example, unicast traffic refers to network traffic that is routed from one source to one destination. As another example, traffic that is routed to two or more destinations is generally referred to as multi-destination traffic. Generally, multi-destination traffic includes broadcast traffic (i.e., traffic sent to all devices on a network) and multicast (i.e., traffic sent to multiple, selected addresses on a network), among other routing schemes.